Thursday, December 20, 2007

warning: sex may result in pregnancy.

"It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected," said Jamie Lynn Spears of her pregnancy. "I was in complete and total shock and so was he."

I'm a bit ashamed for even mentioning anyone connected to Britney ("Leave her alone!') on my blog, since I cannot for the life of me fathom the reason for America's fascination with her, but the above quote by Britney's freshly impregnated 16-year-old sister deserves some mention for its airheaded ignorance.

You see, when a boy and a girl have sex without adequate birth control, then there's a pretty good chance that the girl will get pregnant. Alas, that information is taught in Biology and Sex Ed, two subjects that get pretty short shrift in the schools of the region where Britney's mom parked her million-dollar quadruple-wide luxury trailer.

Robin and I sometimes joke that sex education in her native Western North Carolina consists of the father telling his daughter, "If you come home pregnant, I'll fucking kill you." It's amusing to see that the Fundies on the Right use the exact same approach to teach kids about sex that the touchy-feelies on the left use to teach kids about guns: don't mention it, pretend it doesn't exist, and tell them to not even think about the subject until they're twenty-one.

When you have a culture that connects sex with shame and guilt to such a degree that teenagers won't carry condoms with them because "they don't want to look like they were planning to have sex", you can't be surprised when you end up with the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the Western world.

Oh, yeah...little Jamie Lynn wants to raise her child in her native Louisiana, to make sure "it has a normal childhood".